When you have a “little cruiser” in the home you are always worried about the safety issues. All the baby proofing you do still falls short in front of your little explorer. Therefore having a safe play area becomes absolutely necessary.

Usually the playpens you see in the stores are tiny, with no hard base. The problem is since the baby will have just learnt crawling or walking they want plenty of space to move around and Hard base (I mean not too soft) for them to get balance. The playpen to me looks like a prison. It is safe alright but still a prison.

Play yards are so much better as babies get lot of room to play and since you set it up on the floor or ground, babies learn to balance themselves quickly. You can also get extension gates to increase the play area as the kid grows or as number of kids increase.

You can also take play yards outside and allow your child to play safely in the sun. Or you can use this for keeping away your over enthusiastic dog. Or use it to give room for small puppies to play. You can also protect your christmas tree from accidental tipping. Since you can disassemble and configure these play yards, you can pretty much alter the configurations and block off all the electronic units or fire place or sharp edges of the TV unit. Right now thats exactly what we are doing, blocking our sharp edged TV unit and stairs.

After having both playpen and play yard, I would strongly recommend play yard to everyone who is looking for providing safe but roomy play area for their kids.